Adventures with lightweight and minimalist software for Linux

tty-clock: Taken for granted, for far too long

I casually mentioned tty-clock the other day while traipsing through ncurses-examples, then thought for a half a second and worried that I had never included it here.

A few panicked searches later and my fears were confirmed: Out of all the thousands (and yes, it has been thousands) of programs I’ve looked over in the past 20 months, I never gave proper attention to tty-clock.

That’s something we shall have to remedy.

I can’t think of a system I’ve built in the past five years that hasn’t included tty-clock. I’ve even patched it myself, a long time ago, before it was possible to feed a date format into the display.

tty-clock is usually what I hold up to other console clocks, and see how the fare. If a text-only clock can pass muster with tty-clock, it’s doing pretty well.

You can poke around with it on your own time, but know that it can handle multiple colors now, as well as bold effects, flashing time separators, seconds display, rebounding through the terminal window, 24-hour and/or UTC time, and refresh rates down to the nanosecond. It has evolved quite nicely.

Whether or not you prefer a text-based lifestyle and whether or not your computer can handle the burden of a fully graphical desktop environment, you really owe it to yourself to at least try tty-clock once. My apologies for omitting it for so, so long.😳